


Not Good Enough

by Tysolna



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Future Fic, Gen, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-30
Updated: 2012-06-30
Packaged: 2017-11-08 21:49:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/447918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tysolna/pseuds/Tysolna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when she was a little girl, playing Cops and Robbers with her friends after school, Sally Donovan wanted to be the cop. She was always on the side of the good guys. So why is it that the Consulting Detective is rubbing her the wrong way?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Good Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wondered why Sgt Sally Donovan has such a bad attitude towards Sherlock Holmes. She certainly has attitude, which makes her a good police officer, and she doesn't hesitate to say what's on her mind, sometimes very forcefully. But... "freak"? Where did that come from?  
> Here's my attempt at an explanation.

Even when she was a little girl, playing Cops and Robbers with her friends after school, Sally Donovan wanted to be the cop. It was natural to her, wanting to get the bad guys, wanting to get rid of the evil in the world, although of course at age seven, she was just aware that she enjoyed the chase, running after squealing classmates and pretending to shoot them with her finger.

Sally was a clever girl, and a curious one. She liked discovering things, and school never seemed to be too much of an effort. Her grades were good; not first in class, but certainly in the top five. Mrs Donovan was supportive, even when Sally started acquiring strange hobbies like studying dead animals. She loved her daughter.

Mr Donovan felt the same, but you wouldn’t know it from his demeanour. He probably didn’t even know that his way of encouragement and praise seemed to result in the exact opposite. If Sally came home with a B in some test or other, he wondered why it wasn’t an A, because he knew that she could do it, and he wanted his daughter to succeed. But what Sally always heard was, “I am not good enough. I can never be good enough. Whatever I do, I can’t please him.” She didn’t realise it at the time, but this basic misunderstanding between father and daughter was to become the undercurrent of Sally’s life.

At fourteen, and still in the top five of her class, with high marks in biology and chemistry, Sally’s eyes went near-sighted. Of course she didn’t admit it at first, squinting her way through classes and taking longer to recognise friends walking towards her, and they called her haughty and stuck-up. Then she finally gave in and got her mother to get her glasses.

Teenagers can be so cruel. An intelligent, tomboyish girl, already supposedly stuck-up, and now with glasses? You can probably imagine the nicknames. “Owl” was the mildest. Sally ignored or shrugged, hoping with the desperation that only a teenager can feel for acceptance, friendship, belonging.

What she did find out though was that everyone had a weak spot, an Achilles heel she was able to spot, to discover, to exploit, and then to hold over other people when they hurt her too much, and she learned that the best defense was to hurt them in return, or hurt them before they could hurt her.

Sally had few friends, but that gave her lots of time to study, and she had a goal. She wanted to become a copper, a police officer, and a damn good one, too. She worked in the evenings to be able to save up for an operation to get rid of her myopia, even though she was scared of the procedure. She went to the gym regularly to get in shape. As soon as she could, she applied for a job with the police, and with her grades and her background, she had no problem being accepted.

She worked hard, did Sally Donovan, and she became a good cop, resourceful, clever, good at crime scenes and good with detective work, ambitious. Soon, she was promoted to Sergeant, and assigned to work with DI Lestrade. She was surrounded by colleagues, some of whom became friends, she loved her work, and she was good at it. Deep within her, there was still the undercurrent of “I’m not good enough, I will never be good enough”, but it had made her want to be as good as she could, to be the best, and she was. Lestrade relied on her, her career was assured, and at last, Sally began to relax.

 

Then he turned up, a long streak of piss in a coat, every inch of him blasting with arrogance, cutting through everyone and everything with a mere look. Cutting through her, assessing, evaluating, rating, and discarding her in less time than it took for her to tell him her name. There it was again. "I'm not good enough, I will never be good enough." Without quite knowing why, Sally Donovan took an instant dislike to Sherlock Holmes, a dislike which was intensified when she saw him blatantly break all the rules of good policing, crime scene behaviour, or simply human behaviour, and still get results, and still be asked back by Lestrade, who apparently trusted the man, possibly more than he trusted her. It rankled. It hurt. It made her look hard at Holmes, instinctively trying to find the chink in his armour, until she found the word with which she could strike back, regain the upper hand.

"Freak!"

Sally Donovan was observant enough to notice Holmes wincing very slightly at this word. If she hadn't looked for it, she would have missed it, it was gone so fast under the devil-may-care mask. Then he nodded, just once, acknowledging the word, and went on with deducing yet another impossible murder at the speed of light.

That brief admission of being affected by what she said was not enough for Sally. It seemed as if all the resentment, all the pain of growing up a clever girl, all the loneliness, all the feelings of inadequacy had found an outlet, and that was hurting, badmouthing, slagging off the supposed genius Sherlock Holmes, to his face, to her colleagues, even to Lestrade, and then, disguised as a warning, to Doctor Watson when he appeared on a crime scene with Holmes. She would never have admitted this to herself, in fact she would have been horrified had she realised why she was doing this. It was unprofessional, for a start. But her subconscious mutated the Consulting Detective into a psychopath who was just a hair's breath away from being a killer. A freak.

 

It was years later, after a crashing disappearance and an unexpected return, after the first flecks of grey had appeared in John Watson's hair and Sgt Sally Donovan had turned into DI Sally Reynolds, when both chanced to meet at Greg Lestrade's birthday party. True to form, Sherlock Holmes had already observed all there was to see about the party guests, though thanks to John's calming influence, he had kept almost all of it to himself. Instead he had made significant inroads into the sweets part of the buffet and was now deep in a discussion about the coagulation of blood at different ambient temperatures over a piece of red velvet cake. John watched him with an affectionate smile when Sally Reynolds née Donovan appeared at his elbow, watching the same scene, but with a frown. "So you're still with the freak, then?" she said, a propos of nothing.

John took a deep breath, counted slowly to ten, and, without looking at Sally, started talking very, very softly. "I had to promise him to stop counting, but if I hadn't, that would have been the 487th time you called him that within my earshot. Have you never even wondered why he didn't insult you back? Oh I know he did his usual deduction stuff around you, of course he did. Especially during the time you were with Anderson, not that that was hard to see, the whole Yard knew by the time you broke up with him. Good riddance, I say. But Sherlock was never, you know, personal." He stopped for a moment, glancing at Sally out of the corner of his eye, giving her the opportunity to speak. She remained silent, though he could read the resentment and wariness in her body language. So he continued.

"He never insulted you, never hit back, though dear god, you gave him ample opportunity and reason. A lesser man would have. Hell, I would have. Now, why didn't he? Let me tell you. Because when he looked at you, he saw a little bit of himself in you. Bullied as a child? Never had any real friends? Emotionally distant parents? I can't pretend to know how he knows that, but I know Sherlock. You two are not the same, not in the least tiny little bit, but you are similar. Then you go and decide that he's a freak. And what does that make you?"

John actually sighed as he turned to look Sally in the eye, and he noticed that she looked more flustered and confused than he had ever seen her before.

"I wouldn't go so far and say that he respected you, although that's because he rarely respects anyone. But you could have been friends. Think about that, Sally. You could have been friends."

He waited for realisation to hit her, then nodded once, a surgeon satisfied with his work. He turned and walked towards the buffet. Sherlock's conversational partner needed rescuing, and John had worked up an appetite.

 

Sally Reynolds née Donovan stood dumbfounded for a long time while the noise and bustle of the party flowed around her. There may have been a tear rolling down her cheek at one point, but no-one looked close enough to be sure.


End file.
